Scot McKnight blogged recently about “the MOOC delusion.” I think it is fair to say that anyone who thought that MOOCs would be the future of higher education had not thought about the matter with an adequate historical perspective. It has long been the case that academics have, in some form or other, given our perspectives [Read More...]

Today my class on “Religion and Freedom of Expression” met for the first time. It is a class with a non-traditional format – we meet a few Saturday mornings for a few hours, plus also four evenings when students attend lectures in our public lecture series and have dinner and a Q&A time with the [Read More...]

So, the information literacy song I made, “Viva La Library,” has been subtitled with Arabic subtitles by the Media & Information Literacy Programme in Qatar. My spoken Arabic is minimal and my reading ability weaker still. And so thoughts on the translation would be appreciated from readers who are proficient in Arabic! Below is the original without the subtitles, [Read More...]

Let me begin with a paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 13, reworked for students: If I learn to speak in Latin and/or in Chinese, but do not have love, I am only a fire alarm going off in the middle of the night in a student dorm. If I am able to ace organic chemistry exams [Read More...]

Bryan Bibb has uploaded a talk he gave with the title “Why Are You Here? Religious Studies, The Bible, and Liberal Education” to Academia.edu. Those who teach Biblical studies as part of the Liberal Arts and/or their core curriculum, and who navigate the waters between religious studies and theology and between secular education and religious [Read More...]

Several items of interest have come my way today. The Chronicle of Higher Education had an article about flipping the classroom in an introductory course about ancient Rome. And the supplement to volume 16 of Teaching Theology and Religion is currently accessible for free online, with many book reviews focused on technology, pedagogy, and the offering [Read More...]

The Gospel of Luke depicts a Jesus who learned. Many fundamentalists view Jesus as someone who always knew everything, being a divine person unhindered by human frailties (even if in theory they claim he was fully human as well as fully divine). Yet this Jesus who is supposedly infallible is kept on a very short [Read More...]

Why is it that those who have never studied a topic, and yet are confident they know everything they need to and have no need to learn anything, seem to be the most likely to quote Paul’s words in Romans 1:22, “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,” and do so thinking it applies [Read More...]

This is the answer given by John Horgan in Scientific American to science and engineering students skeptical of their relevance to them: We live in a world increasingly dominated by science. And that’s fine. I became a science writer because I think science is the most exciting, dynamic, consequentialpart of human culture, and I wanted to be [Read More...]

I had a request for lead sheets (lyrics and chords) for the three information literacy songs I shared here recently. The request came from a teacher who wanted to use them in a high school – to be performed on the ukulele. I would love to have a chance to hear how that sounds! Anyway, having [Read More...]